PEP 501 when originally written (not by me) was intended to be the competing standard against f-strings, and to have been more inline with ES6's template strings. There was debate between the more simple f-string PEP (PEP 498) and PEP 501. Ultimately, it was decided to go with f-strings as a less confusing, more approachable version (and also easier to implement) and to "defer" PEP 501 to "see what happens". Since then, the python internal have also changed, allowing t-strings to be even easier to implement (See PEP 701). We have seen what happens, and now its introduced. f-strings and t-strings are not competing systems. They are different. Similar to ES6 templates and namedTaggedTemplates, they are used for different things while API feels similar intentionally. f-strings are not inferior to t-strings, they are better for most use cases of string templating where what you really want, is just a string.